


The Sound Of You Kneeling

by luninosity



Series: Like Sugar (Spell It Out) [7]
Category: Actor RPF, Captain America (Movies) RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - BDSM, Arranged Marriage, Bathing/Washing, Comfort, Consensual Kink, Dom/sub, Domestic Fluff, Explicit Sexual Content, Kneeling, M/M, Oral Sex, Porn with Feelings, Punishment, Relationship Negotiation, Sharing Clothes, Spanking, Subspace, Talking, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-06 17:53:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5426297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sebastian's never broken one of his new husband's rules before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chaosmaster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chaosmaster/gifts).



> And here's where we start what I think of as the second story arc: after they've said the "I love you," how do they actually build this life and this marriage together? I think there're five stories, but we'll see.
> 
> This one's for a lovely friend, and we should really manage to hang out in person when I'm NOT recovering from Major Organ Removal. *hearts you*
> 
> Title from Tegan and Sara's "Red Belt," this time.

_Sebastian_  
  
Three weeks and five days and one morning.  
  
That’s how long a happy ending lasts.  
  
Sebastian’s hand shakes. It’s holding his phone. The phone’s screen wobbles and blurs. He can’t breathe. Lungs stuck between inhale and release. Inconsiderate of them.  
  
Eight texts. Three missed calls. One voicemail. From Chris. His Dominant, his husband, the man he loves.  
  
Chris hasn’t given him many rules. Barely any rules, really. Remember to eat. Stay warm. Let me touch you, an anchor, until and unless you withdraw consent to being touched. Learn a few basic commands for public appearances. Be good when given direct orders, and those won’t be given without care and consideration. And—  
  
And. One more. The last one. The one he’s broken.   
  
He’s afraid he’s going to be ill. He puts a hand over his mouth. The afternoon’s gone from sunny to grey beyond his office window, light smothered by clouds. The air’s buzzing around his ears.  
  
That last one. Answer, even if only to say _fuck off sir I’m busy_ , when called or texted. Answer because Chris will panic if he doesn’t. Answer because Chris has lost someone once before to a horrible untimely whim of fate and Chris has let himself fall in love a second time and Chris will take continued silence as a knife to the gut: to _Sebastian’s_ gut, if he’s found dead in an alleyway or at home, snuffed out by a mugging or a fall down the stairs or a car collision or an aneurysm, leaving Chris’s heart alone and broken anew.  
  
Eight texts, three calls, one voicemail. He feels faint.  
  
He hadn’t meant to disobey. He’d heard the faint vibration beneath piles of snowdrift paper, notes musical and character-related. He just hadn’t…registered the sounds. Preoccupied. Engrossed. Writing.  
  
He’d put the phone on vibrate because he’d had a long-distance video call with Hollywood directors, a conference about the _America’s Captain_ sequel and what they’d like from his soundtrack. Chris had known about that call; Chris had gone out to do some sketches around the city, various neighborhoods and boroughs, captured glimpses of every conceivable facet of humanity. Chris had been getting out of his husband’s way and doing his own work simultaneously: love and respect for Sebastian as a person, not merely a submissive, in every gesture.  
  
The call had gone well. He’d had ideas. Scribbled inspiration. Played newfound fragments of tune for the directorial brothers over the connection. They’d been enthusiastic.   
  
He’d hung up, eyed his email inbox, fleetingly felt like crying. Too many demands, emotional and otherwise: submissives’ rights groups requesting interviews, less sympathetic journalists wanting the story of the brilliant young composer who’d somehow tricked all of society into never learning his true orientation, a message from his mother with an update on his stepfather’s condition and the extraordinarily nice assisted-living home they’d finally toured that morning—  
  
And he just couldn’t feel it all right then, not with a soundtrack plucking at his fingertips and guilt nagging at his stomach, so he’d pushed everything aside and fallen into the welcoming deep cool well of music—  
  
And he’d ignored his phone.   
  
No. Not ignored. Left unacknowledged. Hiding from guilt at not being on that family tour and from obligation as a _de facto_ symbol for the equality movement and from unfallen tears that burn. Hiding in the pitch and sweep of notes, the anguished musical scream of a prisoner of war, the hushed clear heartbreak of recognition.  
  
Chris’s first text had been simple: _heading back, want me to grab take-out, any preference?_  
  
Then, five minutes later: _long meeting? everything ok?_  
  
Then, two minutes after that: _Sebastian? answer me, please._  
  
And one of those calls, no message. Followed by—at about the same time Sebastian’d been experimenting with tormented metal-inspired electronic unease—more texts, in rapid succession like fear-betraying gunfire: _are you home are you ok please answer me_ , and _this isn’t funny I’ll make it an order all over again answer your phone when I call you Sebastian._  
  
Chris _had_ called. And then called back. And left a voicemail. Which he’s not yet listened to. Because he’s scared that he actually will throw up, that he’ll hear Chris’s voice low and afraid and angry because of the fear and angry _with him_ —  
  
He deserves the anger. He deserves the punishment.  
  
The emotions churn in his stomach.  
  
The emotions are confusing. They swirl and bleed together. Dread and realization. Awareness that Chris won’t hurt him, that Chris does love him, that that’s sure as bedrock. Understanding nevertheless, in the old kept-secret frostbitten places that’ve begun to thaw in the sun of his marriage, that Chris has the legal _right_ to hurt him: anything short of permanent disability or death. Chris has always been liberal, even radical, in this relationship; but Chris was raised with more traditional expectations and is comfortable in his role as a Dominant, despite situation-specific occasional fumblings.   
  
What _will_ Chris do?  
  
What will _Sebastian_ do, if Chris does…something?  
  
He carefully sets down the phone, slides out of his desk chair, coils into a human snail-shell on the floor at the base of his desk. Knees up. Face in arms. Wood solid behind his back. Breathing, trembling.  
  
The worst part isn’t not knowing what Chris might do.  
  
The worst part is knowing that Chris will do something, because that feels—  
  
Good? Right? His head pounds. Not right, but—right, yes. He disobeyed. He belongs to Chris. Chris _should_ punish him for this, and he wants that, he wants to have this out in the open, mistake and consequence, the simple clear-cut relief of rules enforced. He’s Chris’s by law, but also because he’s chosen to be: he’s said yes so many times now, and he’ll say it again.   
  
He belongs to Chris and that knowledge sings like reverent rainbows inside his bones and he wants to be good for Chris because that feels good. And if he’s not good, the way he hasn’t been, then Chris will help, will correct him, will take care of him. With compassion.  
  
That perilous swoop of love and desire, plus the plunging comprehension of how far gone he is in this role he’s still figuring out, _plus_ the previous dread and apprehension, gang up and rob him of breath. Tiny on the floor of his office, hidden behind the stalwart desk, he hears his body whimper, bewildered. His body needs Chris. Needs strong hands and security and an anchor amid incomprehensible buffetings of emotion. _He_ needs Chris. He just—needs Chris.   
  
He’s not sure how long it’s been, now. He’s not even certain _what_ it’s been: some kind of crash? Preemptive bad drop, falling from the morning’s peaceful joy to imminent consequence? Purely emotional, and without his Dominant’s presence? Can that _happen?_  
  
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything. He should know, why doesn’t he know, Chris did ask him to do research, the basic classes on orientation and societal expectation and instinctive reaction and response; he’d done some reading and talked to his brother-in-law once or twice but he’d been so busy lately, he’d put the remedial studies on hold because he and Chris were fine, but they weren’t fine, they aren’t fine now, and that’s one more of his failures—  
  
He can’t make his lungs work. He tries to reach up and grab his phone, to hear Chris’s voice. He knocks a pen and a stack of script pages off his desk instead. They hit the floor and scatter. Spots waltz in front of his eyes, blackly mocking musical notation.  
  
A sound occurs. Loud. Not his own shivering dry sobs, the ones that iridesce like broken pearls in his mouth.  
  
A—sound? But he’s here alone. Chris is gone. No one should be here. No one should be unlocking the door downstairs, the door to their apartment—  
  
Thinking’s hard. Too many unstable slippery pieces. He tries. That’s the front door, and the rattle of keys, so the person has keys, which means the person’s one of three: their building superintendent, who can enter for repairs to any of the historic apartment-homes in the tower; Chris’s mother, who has their spare set; or Chris himself.  
  
Or someone Chris’s given keys to.   
  
Someone Chris has given keys to and instructed to come over and punish him with impersonal hands or worse, but the mere fact that Chris would give him to anyone else would be punishment enough and more, he’d never be the same, he couldn’t be, and he thinks that he might die on the dagger-point of even the idea—  
  
Chris wouldn’t. Chris _wouldn’t_. Chris promised to never share him. He’s catastrophizing and imagining what-ifs and he knows that’s some kind of symptom of present irrationality and he can’t seem to stop. Chris wouldn’t, but—   
  
But Chris is gone, out making art, creating beauty, being interrupted by stupid should’ve-known-better submissive’s failures—and if this is a punishment—  
  
He only knows what he’s heard. What he’s had whispered to him in those scattered stolen nights at anonymous clubs: about submissives and the control they need, about what a natural little whore he is. About how he deserved punishment for sneaking out to a club without a collar on, and if he belonged to the Dom or Domme currently whipping him he’d be locked in a chastity belt and gagged and used for unspeakable acts—  
  
He knows that’d been part of the scene. Practiced words. Stage dressing, not real. Catering to the sort of submissive who _would_ seek out underground no-questions-asked clubs for precisely that degradation, humiliation, ultimate liberation. He’d never believed he _deserved_ to be hurt, and he’d gotten off to the words and the private dark thrill of letting his secret out, letting himself indulge in visions of use and abuse, in spaces where he’d paid quite a lot of money to ensure nobody’d ever know. He doesn’t need that, not now. Not with Chris.  
  
But he remembers. And that stage dressing comes from _somewhere_ , those stories full of ice and fire and world-obliterating pain.  
  
The door closes downstairs with a thud.  
  
Sebastian, in an act of frantic courage, snags a hand on the corner of his desk, jerks himself to his feet, grabs his phone. If it’s not Chris, he can call for confirmation that this is expected, surely Chris won’t deny him that; if it’s not Chris _and_ it’s not expected, he can handle that too.   
  
Well. Maybe he can. He’s picked up a few things from stunt-men friends during film-set visits. He hasn’t gotten around to telling Chris as much, he recalls, though he assumes Chris wouldn’t want him to wait and ask permission before kicking home invaders in the face. He wonders whether he’s got good enough balance at the moment to even try.  
  
He steps out his office door and makes it halfway down the stairs and then stops, because he can see the person and the person’s running toward him and calling his name.  
  
And the person’s Chris.

 

_Chris_  
  
Chris shoves open the door at last and charges through. Into their home. Into the home they’ve chosen together, the one they share.  
  
His footfalls beat emptily on the ground. His heart’s attempting to batter its way out of his chest. His feet’re numb way down in their shoes. Sebastian hasn’t answered.  
  
He’d not been afraid at first. That mocking tardiness scampers around his head. His breath burns in his lungs. He’d run up multiple flights of stairs. No time to wait for the elegantly refurbished Victorian elevator.  
  
Sebastian hasn’t _answered_.   
  
Sebastian’s always answered. Three weeks since they’ve said the words: I love you. Three weeks and five days and one morning. More days before that, so many days since their wedding-vows, so many incremental first steps toward joy. Sebastian’s never forgotten that rule before.  
  
A tiny rational portion of Chris’s brain weighs in: he’s never had a reason to, you’ve been home ninety-nine percent of the time, he’s used to being independent. He was bound to slip up. Not his fault. No training. No practice. More than likely everything’s just fine.  
  
He ruthlessly squashes that brain-voice. He’s a Dominant. Sebastian’s his submissive. And even if they’d not agreed on rules—which they had—this is important, because—  
  
His breath hitches. Lungs beneath that tattoo, that name. Matt. Forever gone and memorialized in ink on skin.  
  
Chris has never wanted to impose. Sebastian’s so—  
  
So everything, he thinks. Sebastian is Sebastian: bright-eyed, unthinkingly lovely, capable of composing a heartbreaking aria and in the next breath smacking his own elbow into a rehearsal-room door. Sebastian’s built a life in shining defiance of every rule that submissives’re supposed to follow. Sebastian’s never needed him; has only married him in order to fulfill societal and familial obligations. Sebastian’s competent and kind and sarcastic and brilliant.   
  
He’s asked that brilliance to give up so much. He feels sick.  
  
But he couldn’t not ask, not in the eyes of the world. Sebastian couldn’t not—  
  
God. He feels sick all over again.  
  
Sebastian couldn’t _not_ —  
  
But Sebastian did. Sebastian said yes. When Chris proposed, when Chris proposed anew on that glorious day in that old battered sunshine-strewn apartment: yes.  
  
Sebastian wanted him then. He believes that.  
  
Sebastian loves him. He believes—not without a metric ton of amazement—that Sebastian means that. Sebastian said yes to him. Forever.  
  
Shimmery thrills scamper down his spine: Sebastian Stan said yes to him. Forever.  
  
But those’re ugly thrills even as they shimmer. Sebastian’s not saying anything now.  
  
He should’ve demanded. He should’ve made sure. He should’ve indulged in every fucking disgusting stereotype about never letting his submissive out of his fucking _sight_.  
  
He should’ve made sure that Sebastian’d follow every damn archaic rule about never stepping out the door or going for a frappuccino or wandering downstairs without Chris’s express approval, because—  
  
Because he’d asked Sebastian to answer the phone. And.  
  
Sebastian might be injured at the bottom of the stairs. Sebastian might be too sick to get out of bed, fever scorching beloved cheeks to scarlet flags. Sebastian might be bruised and manhandled by some ogre with meaty paws and evil intentions in a far-off Starbucks. Sebastian might be—  
  
Not dying. No.  
  
God—  
  
No. Not without Chris’s permission. Not without Chris’s presence. Not—  
  
Not again. Please. Not ever—  
  
He yells his husband’s name, voice cracking, and he thinks he must be hallucinating because Sebastian’s right there running down the stairs toward him, oh God, thank God.  
  
Chris stumbles, staggers, gasps as the revelation lands: Sebastian’s here and safe and mobile and _alive_.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Sebastian’s apologizing, tripping over the last step, long legs everywhere, phone clutched in one hand, other hand grabbing at Chris’s arm for balance. “I’m sorry, sir, I’m so sorry—”  
  
Sebastian’s wide-eyed and white-faced and visibly shaken. Sebastian’s heart’s beating like a hummingbird’s wings when Chris steadies him. Chris’s own heart shudders and contracts, afraid in reply. Sebastian _looks_ unwell, shocked and dazed and frightened. Sebastian’s panting like even the run down the stairs’s been too much, and his eyes search Chris’s face with an incomprehensible mingling of fear and relief and contrition, as if he barely even knows who his husband is, as if he can’t believe Chris is here.  
  
Dying, Chris’s brain hisses viciously, he must be, you’re going to lose him.  
  
He grips Sebastian’s shoulders, eases him down carefully. Gets his husband sitting on the bottom stair-step, supported by tender griefstricken hands. Concealing his own horror as best he can: Sebastian doesn’t need more crushing weight right now. “Breathe,” he says, “breathe, it’s okay, it’s fine, you’re gonna be fine,” and the words taste like ash and dry bone and lies.   
  
He begs, holding his husband’s hands, “Can you tell me what—what happened?” and waits for the apocalypse.  
  
Sebastian blinks at him. Confusion in winter-lake waters. Flying-fish and firebirds milling around in anguished bafflement. Sebastian must not be able to find words.  
  
“Okay,” Chris says again, stuck on the word, mindless repetition. “Okay, if you can’t—how bad is it, can you tell me that? Can you just—just nod or something if I say the right thing?”  
  
Sebastian, continuing to look confused, nods.  
  
“Okay. We’re…okay.” They’re not. “Um. Do you need to go to the hospital?”  
  
Sebastian hesitates. Not a nod. Chris isn’t certain what that means.  
  
“No?” he says, “all right, um, no, so—does something hurt? Where?” He brushes fingertips over Sebastian’s temple, over the spot that’d been aching the first morning after their wedding. He’d thought that’d been stress. “Here?”  
  
“I…yes, but…”  
  
“How bad? Can you focus on me?” He lifts Sebastian’s chin, scrutinizes telltale pupils. Sebastian’s eyes’re huge but seem to be tracking without trouble. Chris can’t be reassured. “Are you feeling dizzy? Like throwing up?”  
  
“Chris?”  
  
“Yes or no.”  
  
“Yes…but…not…it’s not…I’m—”  
  
“Did you take anything? When did it start?”  
  
“Chris—” Sebastian says, and then abruptly starts crying, loose unchecked tears that plummet into Chris’s heart with acid aim. He flings arms around his husband, offers words of love, of comfort, of ineffectual soothing babble. Sebastian cries more. Chris doesn’t know what the hell to do, whether kisses will hurt or heal, and settles for gingerly stroking his hair.  
  
Sebastian manages a word, two words, between sobs. Chris, hating his own inadequacies, pleads, “I didn’t hear you, say it again, what do you need, whatever you need, I’m here, one more time?”  
  
“I don’t understand,” Sebastian breathes. “Chris…”  
  
“Still right here.” Petting dark hair, as they huddle together in a heap on the bottom step. The sun’s setting beyond the living-room window, splashing long anxious streaks of rose and topaz across the city skyline. “Anything you need.”  
  
“But…” Sebastian pulls back slightly. Looks up at him. “I’m not…I don’t…why are you…” Followed by a headshake, a swipe of one hand across damp eyes. Sebastian’s wearing his oldest collar, the simple black one with blue suede lining, the first one Chris’d ever bought him; and that sight coupled with that lost expression skewers Chris through like an iron pike: jagged-edged and cruel.   
  
Sebastian’s not legally required to wear a collar at home, though his Dominant has the right to ask as much. But he’d had a meeting today. Video conferences aren’t exactly public but aren’t precisely private, and they’d agreed that—given the need to sell this marriage as acceptable—he probably should.  
  
Chris asks, while the pike twists in his entrails, “Why am I what?” and touches the collar. “Want this off?”  
  
Sebastian’s face goes absolutely colorless. “ _Nu—te rog_ —”  
  
“Okay. Okay, shh, I won’t, I won’t, I swear, I know what no is in Romanian—” He holds his hand away. His fingers shake. “You want it on? You want me to leave it on? Talk to me, Seb, please.”  
  
“Leave it on,” Sebastian whispers. “Chris—or—if you want—I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m yours, I’m so sorry—”  
  
“For what?” He takes a breath, lets it out. “I’m really fucking scared, please talk to me, that’s whatever you want it to be, an order or not. Just say so.”  
  
“You’re being too _nice_ —” Sebastian’s voice splinters, fissures showing, audibly battling tears. “I don’t deserve—I didn’t listen, I wasn’t—good, for you, and I don’t understand—”  
  
Oh no, Chris thinks, starting to fit pieces into a shape. Oh, no. “God, fuck, Sebastian. No. No, you’re hurt and I—”  
  
“I’m not!” With desperate eyes. Tragic blue. “You were—I didn’t know how to say—I’m not hurt, I’m…I didn’t answer you, I didn’t listen, I thought—”  
  
“You thought _what_ , exactly?”  
  
Sebastian, through tears, tries to explain. The medieval weaponry stabs deeper into Chris’s gut. Leaves behind shards of corrugated iron, laced with the bitterness of what his husband’s been imagining.   
  
He takes his submissive’s shoulders, firmly. Internally he’s flailing with no hand-holds in reach: he’s seen one or two bad crashes before—hell, he’d once come to pick his brother up from a short-term contract and punched a reckless idiot of a Dom in the face—but this is new. He’s never seen a collapse this bad, never caused one, and, God, he must’ve—Sebastian must’ve been feeling wrong somehow, some way, when Chris’d left that morning to do sketches, why hadn’t he noticed, why hadn’t he known—  
  
This is new above all because it’s Sebastian, and the ground’s falling out from under Chris’s feet.   
  
He says, determinedly keeping voice steady, keeping hands steady, “I’m here, all right? I’m here and I’m _never_ going to share you, even if I’m mad at you, I promised you that, okay? I’m not gonna hurt you.” And that would be hurt, in so many ways. “I’m worried about you and I need to make sure you’re okay and I’m sorry—” He chokes on the agony of the next words. Sebastian hadn’t believed him? Hadn’t known in his bones that Chris would never give him away?  
  
“I’m sorry if I made you feel unsafe, if you couldn’t believe me, I’m sorry, Sebastian, please.” He’s rubbing hands along his husband’s arms, biceps, shoulders: Sebastian’s wearing a cloud-billow blue sweater today over jeans, and the fabric bunches heavily under his touch. “I’m right here,” he repeats, and Sebastian blinks at him twice and just kind of folds up into his arms, sobbing, hands clutching blindly at Chris’s shirt.   
  
Eventually the sobs trail off into tiny sniffles and hiccups. Chris has kept petting him, rubbing his back, occasionally resting the weight of a hand over the nape of his neck and body-warm leather. The stairs’re solid under their tangled bodies; when he leans back, gathering his submissive further into his lap, the wall’s equally steadfast. The afternoon dwindles into evening, tranquil at its passing.  
  
Sebastian gulps down one more stifled sob and then seems to run out of energy, head resting tiredly on Chris’s shoulder. Chris kisses his forehead. “Doin’ a little better? Still off-balance?”  
  
“Still…” Sebastian bites his lip, gesture unguarded and vulnerable. “Better. You’re _here_. But…”  
  
“Totally here. But what?”  
  
“I broke your rule. That rule…and I know…” Sebastian reaches up with one uncoordinated hand. Touches Chris’s cheek. Chris’s heart shatters with impossible love. “…I know how much that means. And I feel—I know I disobeyed you, I—”  
  
“Tell me what happened,” Chris orders quietly, turning his head to kiss shy fingers. Interrupting the spiral before it can suck his sub down again. Gathering authority. Making himself an anchor in the whirlpool. He hopes.   
  
Sebastian takes a breath. Then staggers through a few phrases: emails, demands, being alone, not being with family, the siren seduction of creative art, the final surfacing from melody and rhythm to reality and a ringing phone. Chris listens without changing expression, trying to be strong. For his husband. For them both.  
  
The relief and worry continue to collide and collude, but with some explanation and some ebbing of mortal dread there’s room for a miniscule thread of anger, or an emotion akin to anger, to sneak in. Sebastian has excuses, ones that Chris does understand, but those aren’t reasons, and Sebastian knows as much. Sebastian scared the hell out of him, simply by ignoring an inconvenient rule, and they’ll have to deal with that.  
  
He says as much, all of it. Sebastian’s expression suggests desire to believe the words. Sebastian’s voice, forlorn as a tattered ghost, waves sad shroud-ribbons at him: “Off-balance, you said…I am, I need—I still need you to—I need you to hurt me, Chris, please, I deserve—”  
  
“ _No_.”  
  
Sebastian actually gasps out loud as this command slams into the air. Chris hears his own voice ring through the apartment: loud and decisive and, yeah, more angry now: angry that Sebastian’d ever ask for that, ever believe himself to deserve it.  
  
“I’m not gonna hurt you. I know why you forgot, okay? You didn’t mean to.”  
  
“But—”  
  
“We need to talk about this.” He gets his husband to sit up, to look him in the eye. This is important. Maybe the most important conversation of his life. He’s got instinct and old orientation classes and true love to offer, pure as the blue in Sebastian’s eyes. “You _don’t_ deserve to be hurt. You didn’t hurt me, not on purpose anyway, and yeah, you fucked up, but so did I, okay? I should’ve paid better attention to you this morning. Before I left. You did try to tell me I could stay.”  
  
“I thought I was all right. This morning.” Sebastian glances down: at the sturdy stair-step, at dust-motes skittering through air, at their bodies touching. “I was frustrated because they’d rescheduled this meeting—because we couldn’t be with my parents this afternoon for the tour—but I said you could stay if you wanted to, because I like having you around, sir…I honestly did just forget. Or I deliberately forgot. I don’t know. But don’t think it’s your fault, please, Chris.”  
  
“Maybe only twelve percent?” He’s aiming for a joke, tentative teasing; he gets one corner of that expressive mouth lifting in a hint of smile. “I should’ve at least held you more. Or just stayed. And, yeah, you’re not wrong, if it’s like twelve percent my fault it’s also something you did, and we’re gonna figure this out together, and I love you.” Terrible grammar, vocabulary wandering everyplace, but he means it, and Sebastian’s nodding.  
  
He slides a hand down along his husband’s arm. Squeezes the closest wrist. Sebastian’s eyes get rounder. “You know why I need to punish you for this? Tell me.” And he hopes that Sebastian’s done some reading about this one, or at least can pick it up through magical instinct the same way he can pick up character notes in a song, because Chris sure as hell isn’t equipped to explain the origin of said instincts without much more expertise.  
  
“Because…because I disobeyed you. Sir.”  
  
Not the worst possible answer. Not the best, either. “Um. Yeah, okay, but—” Thinking fast: “Why’d you ask me to punish you?” He won’t say hurt. “You said need, yeah? About this. Why do you need it?”  
  
A whole host of emotions ripples through blue eyes, a whirlwind Chris can’t read fast enough. “Because I wanted—because I don’t feel right. I wasn’t good. For you. And I need—you need to do something about it, what I did, sir. Please.”  
  
“Because,” Chris clarifies gently, “that’s what works, right? Simple, sort of? You agreed to be mine, you consented to my rules, and when you break rules, you expect consequences. And—what?”  
  
“That.” Sebastian meets his gaze, hesitant but suddenly on securer footing. “Expectations. That made sense. When you said it.”  
  
“Good.” He taps fingers over the fine bones of the wrist in his grip; Sebastian looks at the motion. “So we have rules, so when something comes up, we deal with it, we both know _how_ to deal with it, and nobody’s hiding anything, it’s all open and honest, you with me?”  
  
“ _Da_. Yes. I…think so. I’ve never done this before.”  
  
“I know.” Chris picks up his husband’s hand, kisses the back of it: cool tanned skin, musician’s fingers, calluses and eager clumsy devotion. “Be honest right now. You want me to enforce consequences, right? You _want_ that.”  
  
“Yes,” Sebastian says. Simply that. Truth in his gaze.  
  
“And I will. Not yet. You won’t feel it yet,” he adds, at the look of betrayal. “That was a pretty bad crash, and I know you’re feeling better but we’re gonna give you time, trust me, please.”  
  
“I do. I’m sorry about…” A one-shouldered shrug, helpless and wordless: everything.  
  
“Shh,” Chris says, adoring and admonishing, finding safe harbor in the smile that ventures out at the corners of pale eyes. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t take care of you. Which I am. Right now. Can you stand up?”  
  
“…possibly?”   
  
“If you can, then I’m gonna give you an order, sub.” He waits, watches the lip-lick as the world teeters back toward equilibrium. “If you can’t, I’ll help. But if you can…right now I want you to go upstairs, get naked, and come back down. Meet me in the living room.” Where they can not perch awkwardly on antique stairs. Despite how very much those stairs’ve helped. He adds a drum of fingers over the black line of that collar: “Leave this on.”  
  
Sebastian nods again, posture and breathing calmer. Chris has given him an order, a task, something he can do. And Chris breathes out, too, and kisses him. “Go.”  
  
Sebastian, with heartrending promptness, goes.  
  
Chris, left alone on the stairs, regards Sebastian’s cellphone where it’d fallen unheeded on the step above. It regards him right back, keeping an eye on his intentions toward its owner. After a second he bends down to retrieve it, tossing it from one hand to the other; and then goes out to the kitchen, where he sets it on the table and gives it a pat in a kind of mutual comforting attempt. It watches while he gets out one or two items.  
  
He’s petrified, of course. He’s never done anything quite like this before. He’s punished partners in play, for minor infractions, for the breaking of silly small rules put in place for that exact purpose. He’s afraid he can’t trust his own instincts.  
  
But Sebastian’s liked his instincts on previous occasions. He’s got that.  
  
Sebastian’s alive and safe, and here to be angry at. He’s got that too.   
  
Sebastian’s scared him more than anyone else has ever, over the short weeks of this marriage. With that first gutwrenching fight and hospital calls and confessions of family weight. With the knowledge that Chris, out of the whole infinite world, has been chosen as the recipient of hopeful blue-eyed unwavering trust. And now today.  
  
His heart hurts with it: overflowing.  
  
He goes out to the living room. He tightens his grip on the small bag he’s holding. It crinkles at him encouragingly.  
  
He’s watching the stairs—from the spot by the sofa, he can see the bottom steps—so he knows the exact second his husband reappears, bare feet soundless and heartfelt on the floorboards. Chris waits for him to take a step, notices the flush across his cheeks, the fingers lifting to brush unconsciously over his collar. Over Chris’s collar: encircling Sebastian’s throat.  
  
He says, “Get on your knees.”  
  
Sebastian stops, snatched out of motion and into stillness by the command. His lips part: here? Not beside you?  
  
“Crawl.”  
  
Sebastian’s inhale’s audible across the room. The sound sings through lavender twilight. He lifts that betraying hand again: skin to leather, like the collar’s a charmed object, a source of solace. Fading light writes sonnets across his face, his bare chest, his long-boned strong thighs, the tangle of dark hair where his cock nests. He’s hard and not trying to hide the fact, and Chris loves him more and more with every heartbeat, irrevocably.  
  
Chris is also prepared to take the order back, to call a halt with the twilight as a witness, if this is too far. He’s poised between speaking and waiting longer, undecided, when Sebastian exhales long-held breath and closes his eyes and opens them and—surrenders.   
  
Chris can’t find any other word for it. Sebastian’s eyes get softer and his breathing slows and his posture shifts and everything about him becomes yielding and open and honest, and as he drops to his knees he gazes up at Chris, as if to say: is this right, is this what you wanted, am I being good for you?  
  
Chris swallows. Hard. Manages a short jerky nod.  
  
Sebastian crawls, literally crawls, on hands and knees for him. For him. Across their floor. Adorned with Chris’s collar. Not awkward in the slightest even if the motion ought to be: he’s graceful in submission, deliberate and serene. Purely present, purely given over to order and command.  
  
At Chris’s gesture, Sebastian settles before him, head bent, hands behind his back. Flawless. He’s been practicing. He’s magnificent. Chris resists the urge to stroke hair back from his eyes. He says instead, “Look at me.”  
  
Sebastian, his submissive, does.   
  
The world hums, quivers, realigns. Exactly how it’s always and forever meant to’ve been.   
  
So many years they’ve wasted not knowing each other. But—no, because they wouldn’t’ve been themselves, these selves, otherwise. So, then: so many years spent bringing them precisely here. Where everything is yes. The warmth of Sebastian’s breath brushing his thigh: yes.  
  
He holds up the bag. Sebastian’s eyes ask the question, but he remains in place, waiting.  
  
“Good,” Chris praises, low-voiced and affirming; and takes out one chocolate-covered blueberry and holds it down to parted lips.  
  
Sebastian opens his mouth. Lets Chris place the first berry on his tongue. Accepts the brush of thumb over lips after: proprietary. Those wide blue eyes slip half-shut, poised between earlier shakiness and tempting languor.  
  
Chris feeds him again. More berries, one by one, as Sebastian eats from his hand, whatever Chris chooses to give him. Chris pets him after each; Sebastian sighs and leans into Chris’s leg, gaze growing more and more unfocused, nevertheless clinging to one original shred of confusion.  
  
Chris sets down blueberries. Picks up water. Holds the glass to Sebastian’s lips, making him drink, making him swallow, watching cool clear liquid lap into his mouth. Carefully measured: just a fraction too fast at the final sip, so wetness spills as Sebastian swallows, chokes, breathes with water-droplets trickling along his mouth, his chin. Sir, his eyes ask, I know you did that on purpose, I know you have a reason, I don’t understand, am I meant to?  
  
“Not a reward,” Chris warns, answering the question. “You need the energy. Probably dehydrated too.” He pops another berry, chocolate-draped and decadent, into his submissive’s waiting mouth. Nothing he’s just said’s untrue, but it’s what Sebastian needs to hear. Chris will use this as an excuse to take care of him.  
  
He keeps Sebastian kneeling there, alternating sips of water and nibbles of opulent fruit, until some of the awful tension’s faded, until blue eyes are dark-washed and pliant and trusting. Sebastian rests in place, content with his cheek pressed to Chris’s knee. His breaths come relaxed and demure, though every once in a while a glint of doubt surfaces behind his gaze. Chris knows why.   
  
He’s thinking as fast as he can, while he pets Sebastian’s hair, while he slips two fingers into that mouth for Sebastian to suckle at obediently. Sebastian needs his Dominant right now: someone to give him attention, someone who’ll chastise him, someone who’ll be a shield and a rock for him, granite weathering every storm.   
  
Chris knows about anxiety. About storms. About nerves fraying under lightning.  
  
Right now the storms’re full of intent. Gathered up around a single point: take care of his beloved, and make this right.  
  
He tightens his grip on soft hair inadvertently. Sebastian lets out a tiny sigh.  
  
“Hey.” Chris tugs more, enough to get hazy blue eyes to lift his direction. “Up to talking?”  
  
A nod, though Sebastian’s eyes close fleetingly and then open. “Yes, Chris.”  
  
“Mine,” Chris says, Chris tells him, Chris states as incontrovertible fact. “You’re mine, and I love you, and I’m gonna give you what you need. And you’ll take it. For me.”  
  
Sebastian’s eyes get even wider, lips parted. “Yes. Chris—yes.”  
  
“Good.” Thumb rubbing over the closest cheekbone, memorizing the shape and heat of him. “Good. But we do need to do something about this, sub. I need you to remember, next time.”  
  
“Yes…” Sebastian wavers over the word. “…sir.”  
  
“For now, sure. I told you to use my name more. But for this, if you want, if you need to…” Fingers looped into Sebastian’s collar, pulling: emphasis. “You can call me sir. When I punish you.”  
  
Sebastian flinches, barely noticeable, at the word. Chris swears at himself: too harsh, too much, undoing hard-won steps toward restoration. “I’m _not_ going to hurt you.” He can’t. Won’t. He’s never going to touch Sebastian in anger. “But I need you to remember.”  
  
Sebastian’s face is back to being bloodless under the tan. Emotions too easy, too close to the surface. “Yes, sir.”  
  
Chris starts to speak, takes in that tone and that expression, changes the words. “I’m also not going to do anything you said you didn’t want. If you’re thinking I’m gonna blindfold you or put a hood on you and leave you—” He cuts himself off. Sebastian looks ready to pass out. Probably would, before arguing with his Dominant when he knows he’s in the wrong.   
  
More softly, he finishes, “You told me you didn’t enjoy sensory deprivation. Nightmares, you said. I do listen, y’know. I won’t use that against you.”  
  
Sebastian’s shoulders slump, with the nod. Acceptance. Gratitude, even: when he looks up, when Chris touches an index finger to his lips.  
  
“But something you won’t like, either. Um. Stay on your—wait. Your music. Are you done? With the piece you were working on?” He does understand about art and the demands of the soul. He genuinely does. “Answer me.”  
  
“I’m…not done…but I can stop. I lost it earlier. When I saw you’d called. I’ve got notes for later. Sir. Chris. I’m sorry.”  
  
Chris studies his eyes, sees no hint of dishonesty, nods in return. They can do this. He can do this. He can walk ahead on this tightrope for the man he loves. He straightens shoulders. Persona in place. Hands lifting away. “That’s fine. So…stay on your knees. Over there. In the corner. Facing the wall.”  
  
Sebastian’s eyes get huge. Trembling saucers, spilling blue everywhere.   
  
“You heard me.” Sebastian’ll hate it. Sebastian, who loves being touched, who’s so shy about asking—getting more confident, these days—but basks in every drop of attention…  
  
Chris’ll hate it too. His hands already itch to be back on pale gold Romanian skin. “Crawl,” he says. His body aches: penance for his part in the failure as well.  
  
Sebastian stares at him, and Chris has a momentary burst of panic—God, Sebastian’s never done this, what if it’s too far too fast too soon in the wake of floodwater emotions—but then his husband exhales and drops to hands and knees, and oh.  
  
Oh, that’s beautiful: Sebastian willingly obedient, lowering himself to move as commanded, long limbs forgetting habitual eager clumsiness as if he’s found poise in the act of submission. He’s acres of lean muscle and flat planes and muscular thighs, moving to the spot indicated by Chris’s beckoning hand.  
  
Maybe Chris’s hand quivers. Maybe Sebastian’s just that spectacular, being his.  
  
“On your knees,” he repeats, and Sebastian settles: facing the wall as instructed, wrists crossed behind his back, head bowed, cheeks ever so slightly flushed—humiliation? desire? acceptance? all three?—and no argument in evidence. Only devotion.  
  
“Stay,” Chris says, “until I tell you you can get up,” and then he adds, because he has to, “or if you need to stop, if it’s too much, you remember your colors, you always can,” and Sebastian whispers, “Yes, sir,” in a tone that means precisely that.   
  
Yes. Penance, atonement, expiation: the soothing of restless tempests. Himself and Sebastian, and this is about them, as the evening closes in. As it makes the apartment still and small: an intimate oasis of kindly command and profound capitulation. Yes.  
  
He looks at Sebastian, kneeling naked save for the black band of his collar, bathed in sunset light. He thinks that Sebastian is his, maybe more deeply so than ever before.   
  
“Good,” he says, lightly because anything else would crack open his heart and bleed emotion like rubies across their living-room floor, “stay,” and he backs up into the couch, practically trips over the couch, grabs the nearest book blindly—he won’t be able to focus or read or even comprehend words, but he needs to touch something; and this is the book Sebastian’d been reading, about Mars and astronauts and survival, so it feels like the next best thing to his lonely hands.  
  
He collapses on the couch. Rubbery legs. Shuddery stomach. Sebastian’s staying put. As ordered. As Chris ordered. His submissive. His husband. Obeying him.  
  
That jolt of dark heated want nearly shoves him into going back over and hauling them both off to bed. Where Sebastian can obey orders even more, screaming in ecstasy as Chris claims his body.  
  
No. No, dammit. He’s doing this for a reason. They do need this. Sebastian needs this. Chris is a good Dom.  
  
Chris is trying to be a good Dom. Trying hard.  
  
He watches Sebastian. He wonders whether Sebastian can feel the gaze lying on the line of his collar, the back of his bowed neck, the folded slim muscles of naked thighs and calves. Sebastian had been so _scared_. Had been so afraid Chris would give him away.   
  
The oncoming night groans with that knowledge. Chris gets up, restless and fidgety, and flips on the living-room lights. They burn in halos of topaz: defenses against darkness. Sebastian doesn’t move. A sculpture, an artwork, crafted from pale golden skin and dark hair and submission.  
  
Sebastian needs to know that he _can_ be good for Chris, that one mistake’s not the end of love; that’s in part why. Sebastian also needs to know that Chris can be angry and nevertheless never want to be rid of him; that’s more of why. He’d hoped they both knew that one, and his stomach churns at the thought of how wrong he’s been, but this will help. He hopes. God, he hopes.  
  
Sebastian needs to know— _Chris_ needs him to know—that Chris will take care of him, whatever that entails. Not because of anger. Because they’ve both chosen this life, freely and open-eyed: the life in which Chris can offer gentle rules and commands and structure, and Sebastian can smile and give Chris back the knowledge of laughter.  
  
Sebastian, kneeling alone across the room, makes a quiet sound. He’s plainly trying not to let noise escape, though Chris hasn’t said anything about keeping silent; his shoulders quiver. His head’s bowed even further; a strand of dark hair, getting long, swings into his face. He might be sniffling slightly: crying or trying not to cry.  
  
Chris wants to call stop, wants to walk over and stroke that strand of hair back and cradle him close. He even takes a step that way. Two.  
  
It hasn’t been that long. Sebastian’s unhappy but not more, not yet; he’s self-aware enough to hold back the tears, to censor emotions. Chris needs more. Sebastian needs more. They need those walls to fall. To yield.  
  
He sits back down on the couch, letting his submissive hear the sound. He picks up the book, flips loudly to the first page.  
  
Sebastian’s breath stutters. A catch, a break. The fingers of one hand curl in and release, where his wrists’ve remained crossed behind his back.  
  
City lights bloom in spectacular color beyond the big picture window. Riots of neon and white sparkle alongside smoky emerald forest-park mysteries. Distant sounds of humanity echo; in here, humanity kneels at Chris’s order and waits, vulnerable, beautiful, astonishing.  
  
Chris turns a page without reading it. He’s watching his submissive, who can’t see him. He won’t leave Sebastian alone in this.   
  
He thinks that this is right, too: even as it hurts, even as he watches Sebastian fight back another sob, shoulders tensing, an odd combination of nervousness and peace descends into his heart. Sebastian’s his. Primal and satisfying, terrifying and powerful, that feeling. Heady as absinthe: he could do anything, could give any order, and—Sebastian would listen. Shivers bolt along his spine.  
  
Sebastian would listen—because Sebastian wants to. Because Sebastian chooses to. It’s an awesome grave and divine responsibility; Chris’s heart leaps despite the weight. Sebastian chose this here and now, chose the punishment and him. They’re okay. They _will_ be okay. Delight races through his veins.  
  
He crosses his legs. Wonders whether his submissive, kneeling naked on the floor, can hear the rustle and scrape of suddenly-tight jeans.


	2. Chapter 2

_Sebastian_  
  
Sebastian hears Chris moving—the rasp of fabric, the dry silken rustle of book pages—but the sounds float past him, through him; he’s subsumed by the world, acutely aware of each detail with the odd clarity of dreams. The slight chill of the evening over bare skin, catching on fine hairs and taut nipples. The hardness of the floorboards under his knees. The eggshell-white of the wall when he opens his eyes, but somehow that’s too real, so he stops looking at the corner, the place where lines meet and merge.  
  
Flavors of blueberries and chocolate linger on his tongue. Chris, he thinks drowsily. Chris fed him. Chris made sure he felt safe and grounded before moving forward. Chris.  
  
Chris isn’t touching him now. Chris is far away and refusing to touch him, a restriction; Sebastian’s skin craves him even more powerfully for that, like the onset of withdrawal after delirious addiction.  
  
But he’s being good. He’s accepting the punishment. He does need this: he did something wrong, he hurt Chris, and this is his penance. Atonement, and absolution.  
  
The thought tugs him further into that floaty peaceful place. He sighs, fingers relaxing behind his back. His head droops forward; he tugs it back up, unsure if this is allowed. Chris hasn’t specifically told him to stay in perfect posture, but he wants to just in case.  
  
Being punished doesn’t feel good. He hurts with the emptiness: with the knowing that Chris has chosen, is choosing, to not touch him. But it’s right.  
  
He belongs to Chris. Chris will correct him when he’s done wrong. Chris cares for him and lovingly feeds him blueberries and chastises him when he needs it. He knows he needs this now.  
  
He’s lightheaded. He _belongs_ to Chris. He’s never belonged to anyone before.  
  
His cock fills, a heavy pool of emotion between his thighs. His erection ebbs and flows: he craves this but he feels small and shamed and lonely. He wasn’t good; the knowledge aches. He’s being good now: he’s showing his Dominant that he’s sorry, he understands, he can behave.  
  
His leg feels hot. Wet. A drop of water. He is crying.  
  
His cock swells anew. All of him feels swollen, flushed with sensation, lush as an oasis mid-desert. His head’s heavy and this time he lets it fall. He wants to curl in, to curl up around this strange enthralling pulse in his bones, between his legs. Chris has told him to stay on his knees. Hands behind his back. He whimpers involuntarily.  
  
He can’t think now. No focus. Dandelion puffs in a sunlit blue-sky breeze. He’s the sum total of his senses: hot salted tears, naked skin, white corner walls, hard dark floorboards under folded legs, weighted collar around his neck. The collar is an anchor, a guiding touch, Chris’s hand at his throat. He hurts and he craves and he is good.   
  
His cock, not wholly stiff but not soft, drips wet at the tip suddenly, a liquid throb.  
  
He is liquid too. A river beside an ancient church: reverent and flowing slow as glass. He dissolves into the rippling current. He flies.  
  
And the feeling builds and builds and breaks—not a shattering of crystal but the inexorable cresting of a wave. He might be upright, might have fallen, might have come in a shivering slow orgasm; he has no space to know or wonder. He is feeling only, lost in the swirl and the crest and the water.  
  
Hands touch him. Chris’s hands, he thinks. He can feel the heat, the size, the gentleness; he can smell the scent of Chris, warm and woodsy and masculine. Chris is talking. The words wash over him. He can feel each syllable on his skin.  
  
Chris says the same word again. Then touches his cheek. Then says something else, not exactly apprehensive but heading that way, with the intonation of a question.  
  
Sebastian tries to put sounds in order. A few seconds go by while this happens. Oh. Color. Chris wants to know. Checking in.   
  
He attempts to answer “Green” but his voice won’t come out. He blinks. No, nothing there. How odd.   
  
Chris mutters something under his breath. One big hand tips Sebastian’s chin up. Chris has gotten right down there on the floor beside him, eyebrows concerned. “Sebastian?”  
  
Chris is beautiful, haloed by lamplight. An angel. A fairy-prince from a storybook, long eyelashes and scattered freckles and handsome beard. Sebastian gazes at him, entranced.   
  
Chris swears briefly, an American curse, a prince with a dirty mouth. Sebastian smiles. “Sebastian,” his husband says. “Talk to me, sub. That’s an order. Where are we? Color?”  
  
“You’re beautiful,” Sebastian says dreamily. His voice can apparently say those words. “You married me.”  
  
Chris huffs out a breath, amused but worried. “Kinda the other way around. You said yes to me. Out of everyone you could’ve had. How’re you feeling?”  
  
“Very lucky?”  
  
This time Chris does laugh, but also puts hands on his shoulders and shakes him gently. “My line. Sebastian, please. You’re done, you’re fine, you were perfect, you did everything I asked, such a good little sub for me…” Those large hands collect Sebastian’s, physically moving them from behind his back, massaging them gently. “I love you. I’m not mad anymore. You were so good. You showed me you can listen, and I’m so proud. But I need you to tell me how you’re doing, okay?”  
  
“Green.” He wants to reach for Chris, to be held, but Chris is rubbing his hands now, making fingers tingle with heat. He hadn’t known they were cold. “I feel…like sunlight. I don’t know…I want…” He loses English, loses language, for a second. Language is inadequate in any case. Chris is proud of him. He did well. “I need,” he says, and then stops, frustrated, insofar as he can be through honeyed waves.  
  
“Shh,” Chris murmurs, and scoops him up. “I know. I know what you need, baby, I’ve got you, I’m taking care of you, I promise.” Sebastian’s legs, numb from being folded, collapse; Chris simply picks him up bridal-style and carries him off to the bedroom. Chris is wonderfully strong, Sebastian concludes fuzzily. There’s a pleasant dull throb between his legs; his cock, he remembers. He rubs his cheek against the friendly knit of Chris’s shirt. Red and cozy and nice.  
  
Chris sits down on the end of their bed with Sebastian in his lap. The room’s dark because no one’s hit the light-switch; indigos and greys nestle peacefully around them. Chris strokes his hair, only that, for a moment. Sebastian melts like spun sugar under rain, like candy rivers running down, rivulets of sweet.  
  
“What,” Chris muses, “am I going to do with you, sub?” It’s not a real question; Chris is thinking aloud. Anything you want, Sebastian wants to tell him, but can only wriggle on his lap, bare skin against Chris’s jeans. Chris sets a hand over his collar, at the nape of his neck. Sebastian’s breath catches. Please, please, and he doesn’t even know what he’s asking for but he needs more.   
  
He tucks his face into Chris’s neck. He’s _not_ asking. Chris will take care of him. He belongs to Chris. The simplicity of this leaves no room for anything else. His desires are Chris’s, because he is, because he wants to be.  
  
His body wants Chris. His nipples crinkle, taut; his cock’s an endless delicious thrum of sensation, balls tight and ready. He whines when Chris strokes his hip.  
  
“I think you need to know you’re mine.” Chris kisses the top of his head. “That’s it, right? You need to feel it? The reminder? So you know. Come here.”  
  
He ends up arranged across Chris’s lap, face-down, backside lifted. The topmost blanket, an extravagant billow of fluff, feels nice against his tearstained face. Chris takes his hands and sets them behind his neck so Sebastian can feel the leather of his own collar, and squeezes both wrists. This is a signal they know: don’t move. Contentment spreads easily through his body, head to toes.  
  
Chris runs a hand over the curve of his ass, pauses to squeeze there too. “You like bein’ spanked. And I like the way you look, the way you feel, all hot and red for me, my hands on you. Feel up for that?”  
  
“ _Da_. Yes, sir.” He’s drifting in those sugared clouds, languid and pink and gold, but he knows now that answering Chris always is important. “Please. I want…I need you to…I want you. Yours.”  
  
“Mine.” Chris pinches his ass, hard, no warning. The bite’s sharp and splendid. Sebastian tumbles further into iridescence. His hips rock unbidden against his Dominant’s thigh; his cock drags over rough denim. Chris rubs the spot after. “You’re going to bruise. Still green?”  
  
“Yes, please.”  
  
“Mmm…only ten. Spanking. Because I say so. No argument.”  
  
He can’t. He wouldn’t. Not here in this gilded world, where every touch’s heightened and spun out to impossible ecstasy.  
  
“Tell me if it’s too much,” Chris whispers. And brings one hand down, bare skin cracking across skin.  
  
Sebastian wails. Chris isn’t holding back, is making good on that promise to make him feel it. But he needs that; oh, he needs that. Chris spanks him again, right over the first mark, and he’s crying in earnest, because it _scorches_ , but it’s a cleansing flame. White-hot and divine. Scouring any last unhappy scared shrouds out of his heart.  
  
He can’t count and he can’t hold still, squirming in Chris’s lap, sobbing, fingers clutching at his collar. His hips move of their own volition, lifting to meet the next impact and the next. Miniature licking tongues of flame dance along every nerve; his mind’s a glorious blank, emptied out and filled up by Chris’s presence. Chris’s marks on his skin claim him and reclaim him, melting him down and forging him anew to fit those hands.  
  
Chris pushes his legs further apart. Sebastian loves that sensation, being manhandled and arranged by his Dominant, his husband. Chris takes care of him. Always.  
  
Further, and his body’s exposed, spread wide enough that his hole must be visible, pink and vulnerable, displayed for Chris. Sebastian keens, open-mouthed, cock caught between his stomach and Chris’s thigh and leaking continuously. He’s so wet for Chris: there where his arousal pools, and his face, where he’s crying into the blanket. He loves this too. He loves the hard bright spark that flares up in fireworks when Chris spanks him there, centered right over his needy little hole.   
  
Chris scratches him too, nails etching lines into reddened flesh; that’s a different but no less pleasurable agony. Sebastian shudders in dazed bliss and goes limp. He’s far away now, but present, anchored by coruscating ribbons of pain and delight. He’s shivering, intermittent small tremors that he can’t control; he moans without restraint when Chris spanks his lifted backside again, when Chris spanks his fluttering hole and says “Mine.”  
  
He writhes on Chris’s lap, mindless, lost in euphoria. Being lost does not frighten him. Not with Chris to bring him home.  
  
“One more,” Chris says, voice low and commanding, a powerful rumble, and spanks him hard, so hard that Sebastian cries out, dizzy from rapture. Chris’s other hand jerks his head to the side, presses fingers into his mouth, muffling the sound. Sebastian sucks at them obediently, devoutly.  
  
Chris permits this for a minute, other hand resting hot and solid and appreciative over freshly-spanked skin, then lifts him and moves him. Puts him on his back, in fact, in the center of the bed; and Sebastian cries more freely when new handprints meet even their silky sheets. He’s not protesting the hurt; he doesn’t understand, but he accepts that. Submission washes through him like clear compassionate oceans, like the blue of Chris’s eyes, and leaves him tranquil.  
  
Chris steps away for a moment, but comes right back, naked now. Sebastian knows this because his husband kneels above him to take his hands; Chris’s cock stands up stiff and thick and shiny with desire. Sebastian smiles because Chris wants him; Chris notices him smiling. “See somethin’ you like?” Boston glimmers in the folds of that history-rich accent, a world of freedom and deep roots and family. “You’re so fuckin’ good, baby. Being so good for me. So gorgeous, and so sweet, the way you give me, God, everything, I can’t even—I love you so much. I hope you know.”  
  
“I know,” Sebastian agrees. “You love me. I’m yours. I’m—good? For you?”  
  
“So good.” Chris is tying his wrists—tying them to the headboard, in fact, so he can’t move. When finished Chris bends down to kiss him. Chris tastes wonderful and licks into his mouth and nips at him lightly; Sebastian opens up for him, wrists joyful in their bonds.   
  
“This okay?” Chris touches one of the ropes. Navy blue and solid satin, they’re designed for this purpose; that’d been a memorable shopping day. “Tell me if anything feels uncomfortable.”  
  
“No. Just…happy.” Only that. Happy throughout. Suffused by it like transcendent light.  
  
“So good,” Chris says again, gazing down at him. “My perfect sweet submissive. The way you look when I spank you, the way you look with my collar on you, my hands on your ass, and then you look at me like that…God, I love you. I love you so much, thank you, thank you for marrying me. I’m gonna do your legs too, I think, keep you tied up for me, sub.”  
  
He does. Artist’s hands with knots and blue rope. Sebastian’s lying spread out across the bed now, fastened to bedposts and the headboard, laid bare for whatever his Dominant wants to do with him. His ass throbs but it’s all part of an overall luminous glow: the spanking, his unrelieved cock and the weight of his balls, the tug when he twists a wrist just to feel it.  
  
Chris kisses him again, and pinches his nipple, cruelly enough to make him sob into the kiss. The shock goes straight to his cock, a line of lightning down his spine.  
  
“Poor little sub,” Chris murmurs, lips wandering along his jaw, brushing the leather of his collar, unremoved, encircling. “Think I’ve hurt you a little too much, maybe, for clamps on those. Been asking a lot. And you’ve been taking it so well.” But he’s playing with that tormented nipple while talking: flicking, twisting, pinching more, almost absentminded. Sebastian shivers. Loses coherence as decadent anguish builds. Loses awareness, flying higher.  
  
Chris’s weight shifts. The hurt at his chest ceases. Chris trails kisses down his stomach, along his left thigh. Sebastian’s head rolls across the pillow. He’s making small broken sounds, not words.  
  
“I’m taking care of you,” Chris promises. “I’m always gonna take care of you, this is me taking care of you, and I want you to feel good, Sebastian. So I’m gonna make you feel good, and you can come when you need to, okay? Just lie still and let me make you feel better.”  
  
He obeys, of course. He can’t move because his limbs feel sluggish and distant, but he won’t try. Chris gave him an order. He’s Chris’s good boy. Chris’s submissive.  
  
Chris moves again, further down the bed. Wet heat wraps around Sebastian’s straining cock. Chris’s mouth. On his cock.  
  
His mind goes silent, sliding into some space that’s rich and dim and shadowy and velvet, scratched with the roughness of Chris’s beard against tingling skin.   
  
Chris takes him in and sucks at him, licks him, teases his head with tongue and small laps at the slit where fluid spills free. Chris is—  
  
But Dominants didn’t—Chris has never before—  
  
Chris cups his balls with a hand, playing, exploring. Chris’s mouth’s gentle and infinitely patient, drawing only pleasure out of his body now, after the pain. Sebastian’s crying from confusion, from how good it feels, from the need to chase the feeling and thrust into Chris’s mouth; but Dominants didn’t play this role, didn’t offer this; but Chris told him to lie still and _take it_ , and he tries as hard as he can, but he can’t _think_ as his body melts into yearning bliss—  
  
Chris pulls off long enough to say, “You can _move_ , Seb, I didn’t mean you had to stay frozen, also tell me if it’s not good, it’s been like fifteen years since I’ve done this, but yeah, um, I love you,” and licks the tip of his cock.  
  
Sebastian gasps. Hips jerking off the bed. Chris, though taken by surprise, grins and dives back in.  
  
With more determination. With obvious intent. Inexorable and omnipresent, that mouth and those big hands encompassing Sebastian’s entire world.  
  
He’s whimpering, so close, riding the edge and quivering as Chris takes him apart. Chris doesn’t let up, and Sebastian twitches and trembles in the restraints, held by ropes and Chris’s mouth working between his legs and Chris’s presence. He needs—he can’t quite—he cries, twists wrists blindly, pushes upward into his Dominant’s throat. Chris’s hands on his thighs both soothe and madden, the gentleness too much and not enough, and—and—  
  
Chris slips a hand under him, cupping the burning prints on his ass. Chris presses a finger, just one, over his hole, stroking the rim where he’s sore from ruthless repeated spanking. Chris doesn’t push the finger in—Sebastian shudders with dreadful desire: Chris _could_ , without lube, with his submissive tied down and unable to stop him, and his submissive wouldn’t stop him—but instead _taps_ , once, twice.  
  
Sebastian screams, and comes, and arches up off the bed into those beckoning strokes of tongue—  
  
The world vanishes in ecstasy, then.  
  
  
  
_Chris_  
  
Sebastian comes and comes, back bending in a lovely bow, cock jerking and spurting release into Chris’s mouth, down Chris’s throat. Chris swallows, swallows more, drinks him down. Sebastian’s sweet and masculine, like the juices of earlier blueberries and the heat of a male body, and Chris loves the taste and loves him and loves the knowledge that Sebastian’s come apart like this for him.  
  
He licks more as his submissive’s orgasm ebbs, prolonging the last embers. He rubs his fingertips across the opening of Sebastian’s body, and is rewarded by a soft moan and one more dribble of fluid. He sucks and mouths at that thick cock, knowing Sebastian’s oversensitive now, so the lightest touch’ll ride the line of resplendent anguish; Sebastian makes a wordless sound of dazed pain and pleasure, limp but twitching helplessly as Chris teases his body.  
  
He’s beautiful, so beautiful, and Chris all at once can’t wait. Lust slams into his bones like a freight train, and he slides his mouth off Sebastian’s cock and kneels between spread-open tied-down legs and takes himself in hand. One stroke, two—  
  
And he comes, gasping and groaning, in a wave of overwhelming release. His come lands on Sebastian’s body: stripes of white paint his submissive’s spent cock, taut stomach, muscular chest. Sebastian’s eyelashes flutter; Sebastian’s lips part, and his head lolls to the side, adrift.  
  
Chris pants, getting breath back, gazing down at him. Sebastian’s not precisely unconscious, but not exactly awake; that last sensation, Chris’s orgasm splashing across him, must’ve been the tipping point. He’s practically fucked his submissive to the point of passing out.   
  
Consensually so, though. Sebastian said yes. Sebastian told him they were good to keep going.  
  
He considers his husband for a minute, as Sebastian lies insensible across their bed, spread-eagled and tied down and messy with their mingled release. The room’s hushed and private, a study in shadow and smoky light; the bedroom shades’re pulled but city lights twinkle and peep around edges. The moon’s just past full, big and bright. Sebastian’s breathing slows, deepens, finds recovering rhythm; he’s wrung out and exhausted and sublime, belonging to Chris.  
  
Whose heart turns over, wrung out and recovering too. He takes a deep breath, letting the diamond edges of love pierce his chest; and then he unties his submissive’s wrists and ankles, carefully.  
  
Sebastian stirs as Chris touches him. Mumbles something indistinct and possibly not English. “Shh,” Chris whispers, heart cracking in strange too-full ways, shattering from fondness. The ropes are smooth but Sebastian’s got pink marks across wrists regardless, from unthinking tugs and twists. He rubs them reassuringly. “You’re safe, I’ve got you, you’re so good for me, I love you.”  
  
Long eyelashes quiver and lift; pale winter-blue blinks at him. Not even present enough to be confused; only trusting innocence in those endless skies. Sweet, Chris thinks again. Willing, in his Dominant’s arms.  
  
“I’ve got you,” he says, making his own voice firm as stone, a monument, a vow. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay, sub, you’re fine, you were perfect, you’re mine and I’m right here.”  
  
Sebastian cries a little, then. Chris is expecting that, given the intensity, and holds him, pets his back, kisses him. Sebastian trembles. The bed cradles them in protective sheet-fortresses and quiet.  
  
When some of the aftershock’s eased, Chris touches his cheek, gets eyes to meet his. “You back yet?”  
  
Sebastian bites his lip. Then shakes his head, wide-eyed and solemn and silent.  
  
“Okay,” Chris agrees, “that’s fine, whatever you need, want me to hold you more?”  
  
Sebastian nods, still not speaking. Tear-tracks, drying now, capture the few stray bits of light in the room. His body’s sticky with their climax and they’ll need to change the sheets but that doesn’t matter. The sheets don’t mind. This is an enchanted moment, swinging in the air like a bubble out of time, like a glass castle from one of Sebastian’s stories, and nothing’ll break it.  
  
Chris puts both arms around him. Chris holds him in the night.  
  
After some time—Chris can’t see the clock and isn’t going to move—his husband shivers, a sort of full-body reawakening, and sticks a cold nose into Chris’s neck. Chris laughs softly, pets him, cradles his head with one hand. “Shh. Hold still—” He yanks covers up and over them, destroying any semblance of neatness the bed might’ve had. “Better?”  
  
“Mmm,” Sebastian says, and stops using Chris as a face-warmer and peeks up. Chris misses this positioning—himself helping warm up his husband’s chilly adorable nose—instantly. “Sir?”  
  
Unexpectedly, that stings. Like a silver of glass, like a broken needle-tip to the heart. He’d asked Sebastian once to use his name more; he’d said this evening that _sir_ worked for punishment. He strokes dark hair, pushes down the knot in his throat. “What do you need? Water, food, bath? Somethin’ for bruises, maybe?”  
  
“Please talk to me.” Sebastian’s voice is steady but small. “I just want to listen. I like that. An anchor.”  
  
“Oh. Um, yeah, sure.” About what? About how this love has broken him and made him whole a dozen times over, how his heart’s in Sebastian’s hands, how he wants to grin every time Sebastian sneezes or yawns or puts his head in Chris’s lap for hair-petting or eats breakfast? “I love you. I love your hands.”  
  
“My hands?”  
  
Surprise blooms in his chest: Sebastian’d asked _him_ to talk. “Yeah. The way you talk with them. The way you write. You were making guacamole yesterday and I just kept watching you, like, pick up fruit and spoons and whatever the hell you put in guacamole that makes it actually bearable, and I kept thinking about how lucky I was.”  
  
Sebastian pokes him with one of those expressive fingers, not hard. “You don’t like guacamole? You never said. Sir.”  
  
“I like yours. Not a big fan of whatever my brother buys.” Please say my name. Please. “But you know how to cook. Nobody’d call what he does cooking.” They’re talking about Scott now. His brother. “You know you don’t have to cook for me. Us. Is this helping? Is there anything you, y’know, want me to say? That I’m not…saying?”  
  
Sebastian curls a little closer to him under blankets. His eyes’re paler in the non-light, a silvery wash of grey in dimness. In brighter light they’re mountain-blue, winter-blue; in other greener light, when he wears green too, they pick up hints of springtime grass like the first snowdrop breath of the season. Chris wants to draw him, and will never find the right color for those eyes.  
  
“I want to know,” Sebastian murmurs, “if you don’t like guacamole. Or tiramisu. Or lamb stew. Or, I don’t know, twice-baked potatoes, I haven’t actually made those for you yet. I should.”  
  
“You’re promising baked potatoes to a person from an Irish family,” Chris says. “I love you. You heard me, right? About food.”  
  
Sebastian laughs softly. His body feels less cold; they’re both messy now, dried release and sweat and the residue of love-making. Chris wants to kiss him so badly, hurting with it, loving him.  
  
“I heard you. I like cooking, when I have the time. That’s not me being traditional. Or I suppose it is, but not _because_ it’s traditional, just because I enjoy it. Chris?”  
  
Tears burn sudden behind his eyes. “Yeah?”  
  
“I love you.” Sebastian leans in and kisses him: splendid and sure enough to transform doubt into joy. “I asked you to talk to me and you did. I asked you to hold me and you did. You’re wonderful, Chris. I’m very tired but I feel…like everything’s shining. Brighter. And that’s because of you. _Te iubesc_. I love you.”  
  
“Oh,” Chris whispers, and buries his face in Sebastian’s hair. “I love you.”  
  
This time Sebastian holds him, or they hold each other, or there’s no difference. The shadows deepen in the bedroom as night meanders on, content.  
  
“Did I hurt you, though?” He’s pretty sure now that Sebastian’d tell him, but he has to ask. He touches a finger to those curving lips, to the line of black leather around that elegant throat. “Was that okay? As far as, um, me…punishing you?”  
  
“Yes, to the second. I believe so.” Sebastian makes a wry sort of expression at him, but puts his own hand over Chris’s atop his collar. “I’ll certainly remember this. And to the first, I’m a bit sore, but I’ve felt worse after nights at certain clubs. I said happy; I meant it. May I ask you a question?”  
  
“Of course,” Chris grumbles, mildly insulted at the need to ask permission, mildly jealous at the mention of those occasional impersonal previous hands on his sub. “Anything, you know that, go on.”  
  
“You know I feel safe with you,” Sebastian says, answering the unvoiced concern rather than asking immediately. “I only thought I should ask, because...it’s somewhat personal.”  
  
“Hey, I said anything.”  
  
“You said it’d been years since you’ve done…what you did for me. At the end. Fifteen years.” Of course Sebastian’s remembered. Composer mind and storyteller heart, lying secure under blankets at Chris’s side. “You did that for…” One hand ventures out to brush the name written on Chris’s ribs. “Him.”  
  
Breath leaves his lungs, his lips. Matt. And Sebastian’s hand resting over that tattoo. “…yeah.” He clears his throat. “Yeah.”  
  
Sebastian seems to be waiting, or hoping, for more. Chris discovers strength in the undemanding support of that gaze, and goes on. “I, uh. We. We were kids, y’know, teenagers, we wanted to, um, try everything. I know it’s not, we’re not supposed to, Dominants, we should be getting serviced by you or whatever…but I wanted to. To make him feel good, the way I felt when he—and I wanted to know how it felt, and we just kinda…” He swallows, expecting the usual lump of emotion, but the words’re oddly easy as they come. “We played around. I was straight-up awful the first time, teeth and choking myself with it and tryin’ so hard to be perfect when neither of us knew what the fuck we were doing…”  
  
He’s smiling now, remembering. Sebastian nods, eyes opaque behind shadow during the movement, but not interrupting.  
  
“Probably still kinda awful? Sorry.”  
  
“I liked it. But then I have no basis for comparison.” Those eyes invite him into the teasing moment, when Chris glances sharply that way. “He must have loved it too.”  
  
Chris snorts. “He was like sixteen. We both were. Pretty much _any_ kind of sex was the best fuckin’ thing ever.”  
  
“But you knew what you each were. Orientations.” Sebastian, Chris understands like a spill of icy water down his back, must’ve also known. Alone. “You weren’t nervous about that—trying those things, the things society wouldn’t approve—when you knew…”  
  
“Nah.” He resettles the hand over his husband’s collar, at the back of Sebastian’s neck. “We thought we were invincible. And _he_ wasn’t scared, and he was my best friend.”  
  
Sebastian nods again. Sebastian’s a good listener. Hearing all his words.  
  
“I love you,” Chris says. Important. Crucial, even. “I love _you_.”  
  
“And I you.” Sebastian takes his other hand, folding it up in that long-fingered one. Crooked smile, quiet gaze. “Very much. Would you…if you wanted to tell me about him, I’d like to listen.”  
  
Heartfelt, a knowledge from bones and soul and memory, Chris offers up, “He’d’ve liked you.”  
  
“It’s an honor.” Sebastian’s eyes meet his, equally genuine and serious and warm in reply.  
  
Chris wraps arms around him. Thinks about some of those stories; thinks about Sebastian asking him to talk. Something—some old stone, some broken inscription over a grave—cracks open in his chest, and the words turn up and take shape on their own.   
  
“We met in fourth grade,” he says. “He was the new kid, just moved in, and nobody knew him yet, and we had a teacher who made us write spelling words on the board, and you know I hate going up in front of everybody, and it was my turn, and peninsula’s a stupid fucking word anyway, too many n’s, and I just remember sweating and freezing and thinking I was gonna throw up in front of the class, and when I looked over my shoulder…”  
  
When he’d looked, Matt had been holding up a piece of paper: PENINSULA. Big enough to see the correct spelling, big enough to capture Chris’s childhood heart. They’d both gotten in trouble for that—assistance not allowed—and Matt had come over after school the very same day, and just about every day thereafter.  
  
Sebastian smiles at all the right places in that story. Sebastian puts an arm around Chris’s waist and a head on Chris’s shoulder and asks a question or two. And Chris can talk, and does, while his husband listens.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay! Moving to the new house and all. Anyway, here you go!

_Sebastian_  
  
“I was thinking,” he begins, lying cradled in Chris’s arms. He’s protected here; he’s drowsy, worn out and heart-lightened. Chris gave him a gift he’d’ve never even known to hope for, tonight. Not only the thrill of his Dominant’s mouth, either.  
  
Well. Perhaps that too. But mostly the other part. The words.  
  
“About what?” Chris nuzzles him, an affectionate head-bump that rubs beard-scruff along Sebastian’s cheek. “You _sure_ I didn’t—”  
  
“I’m fine, _iubi_.” Love. The endearment comes easily; he means it. He means love as well when he says _sir_ , when he’s never fully embraced this role for anyone else; he wonders whether Chris knows that’s what he’s saying. “I was thinking, in the future…of course I’ll not forget to answer you again, or at least I’ll try, but…would it help if I wore something? Some sort of monitor, or heart-rate tracker? So you’d know if I were in distress.”  
  
Chris’s mouth literally falls open, jawline etched in dim pewter light. “If you wore—you’d—seriously?”  
  
“It’s a thought.”  
  
“Yeah, but isn’t that kinda Orwellian?”   
  
Sebastian cocks an eyebrow at him. Chris flicks a fingertip admonishingly at his nose. “I do read. Not as much as you. But anyway. You’d be cool with that?”  
  
He’d made the suggestion half-seriously and half-facetiously, contemplating ways to solve a problem, means to reassure an anxious still-wounded Dominant. He turns the idea over for a moment in his head before answering. He’s used to independence—but wearing a smart watch or a fitness monitor wouldn’t kill him. He’s never wanted to be controlled by an owner—but in all likelihood he’d barely notice once distracted by music.   
  
And it might help Chris, whose heart’s so large and vulnerable and full of frightened love.  
  
He says, sticking cold toes between Chris’s ankles, “We could try. I can let you know if I hate it. But I’m not opposed.”  
  
“Wow,” Chris breathes. “Just, I mean, wow. I don’t know, though. Give me a while to think about it. I want to say yes, but I—kinda don’t. I shouldn’t need that. From you.”  
  
“I don’t believe there’s any such word. Should.”  
  
Chris laughs. Through shining eyes.  
  
“And I speak multiple languages,” Sebastian adds, “so I am right, obviously.”  
  
“Of course you are.” Chris draws him in for another kiss, unhurried but delicious as fresh berries and fine wine. “Totally. Can I clean you up? Feeling up to that?”  
  
“Yes, please,” Sebastian agrees, contented and demure, and allows his Dominant to bundle him up in blankets and bring him a bottle of cold water to sip slowly and sprint off to the bathroom to, presumably, discover other hotter bathwater in the wilds of their apartment.  
  
His feet aren’t cold anymore. He wiggles his toes. They feel pink, he decides. Surely toes can feel pink. In fact all of him feels pink. Fluffy. Cloud-like. He’s made of cotton candy. He’s fulfilled and languorous and sated and relieved: given relief in the truest of ways.  
  
When he breathes, when he swallows, he can feel the embrace of Chris’s collar around his throat.  
  
The blankets tuck themselves around him, beaming.  
  
Chris comes back, also beaming, a tiny bit nervous. “Seb?”  
  
“I like water,” Sebastian says vaguely. He’s appreciating cool crystalline hydration on his tongue, the slide of it down his throat when he drinks more. He’s aware that he’s floating a little: grounded enough to talk, but hypersensitive to sensation, and lacking verbal filters.  
  
It’s that weight. Chris’s collar. Like Chris’s big hand curled around his neck, and—  
  
And, oh, that thought, that not-quite-formed thought, Chris’s hands and his throat and a surrender of even the air he breathes, while Chris cares for him—  
  
He trembles. Inhale tangled up with desire. With shock.  
  
Chris sits down beside him, touches his cheek. “Water’s pretty awesome, yeah. You okay? Still with me?”  
  
“You asked that on our wedding night.” He turns his head, kisses his Dominant’s hand. “Still yes.”  
  
“So goddamn amazing,” Chris breathes. Those earnest eyes fill up with wonder, with a need to protect and care for, with love. Painted in every scattered freckle, limned along each long eyelash. “I love you. Bathtub?”  
  
He nods. He wants to take care of his husband more—Chris told him a story to rival any heroic fairytale, and he’s more honored than words can say—but he’s put most of his energy into the first burst of coherence, and now he’s very tired. And his backside’s starting to register soreness, and his body’s wrung out from the aftermath of kneeling and tears.  
  
“Shh,” Chris whispers, “you’re okay, I’ve got you, just let me—I want to, I want to hold you, I’m gonna take care of everything, okay? I’ll make it better.”  
  
Sebastian frowns at him a little. “There’s no such thing, Chris.”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“As better. Than this.” He sits up—with help; Chris is arranging arms so that Sebastian’s holding on around his neck—and looks his husband in the eye. “You’re splendid and I love you.”  
  
“Yeah,” Chris says, fond and half-amused and half-wistful, “and you’re pretty out of it, baby, I can tell, come on—” and scoops him up out of bed. Sebastian makes a plaintive sound in the direction of his blankets. They’d been good company. Toasty.  
  
He pulls thoughts back to the moment. Pokes Chris with a finger. “I am. Yes. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t mean it. Splendid.”  
  
“Uh-huh.” They’ve made it to the bathroom now; a miniature lake of steam and softly lapping water awaits. Chris eases him down into the tub, pauses, skims fingers over the collar. “I’m gonna take this off you. Just for now, so I can wash your hair. I want to put it back on, though, after. That work for you?”  
  
Very much yes. Chris needs that, he understands through the twin hazes of afterglow and soothing heat. Chris needs to know that his submissive’s safe and sound and whole and his, in light of the afternoon’s fears and that coruscating punishment scene and those stories from out of the past.   
  
He doesn’t mind. Himself, Sebastian Stan, the submissive who’d never worn a collar; but he _doesn’t_ mind, and more. He wants to wear it. That craving reverberates like a church bell, a clarion call down in his bones, and he answers. “Yes, Chris.”  
                                                                                                                                              
Chris unbuckles the collar with regret evident in artist’s hands, not letting it get wet. Sebastian does not regret the momentary loss of weight. It _is_ momentary, and Chris has promised to wash him, and Chris has taken it off and will put it back on him when the time is right.  
                                                                                                 
Chris, sitting on the side of the tub, collar dangling loosely from one hand, starts to speak. Stops, seeming arrested in place, simply gazing at him. Slowly, the other hand drifts over. Nudges Sebastian’s chin up a fraction: not because they’re not looking at each other, they are, but a silent affirmation of command. The hand lingers, lifting his chin, keeping him in place.  
  
Sebastian gazes back as steadily as he can. He’ll be Chris’s rock and anchor in grief-laden tempests. He’ll be Chris’s sword and shield when the fears press in from every side and the world shouts too loudly and the noise rattles vulnerable heartstrings. He can be Chris’s safe place and oasis, where hurricanes become distilled to one clear-cut bright imperative: care for this person with every last drop of care.  
  
Besides, that’s his oasis too. Green grass and growing things. Like hearts.  
  
And that hint of regret or nervousness in Chris’s gestures vanishes, swept away on a loving zephyr. No room for those. Not anymore.  
  
Chris lavishes attention upon him. Gathers water in hands, spills it over his sticky stomach, soaks his hair, lathers soap into improbable whipped-cream heaps. Takes Sebastian’s arms and cleans bare skin, inch by inch; the skin along the inside of his forearm sings, and he shivers in delight: he’d never known he could quiver with wonderment there. But of course even the ordinary places of his body, the crooks of his elbows and the too-long bones of his shins, light up and become more when his husband caresses them. Of course.  
  
Chris directs him to lie back. Big hands cup his cock just beneath the surface of the water; Sebastian’s too exhausted for much, but his body makes a valiant effort. More so when he looks: his flesh lies limp and soft and spent in his Dominant’s hands, as Chris fondles him, cleanses him, handles him with firm authoritative kindness. The length of his cock stirs, half-hard, keenly aroused at the helplessness and tenderness, at the contrast of his fragile body and those broad palms and fingers. Chris takes him in hand and gives him a leisurely stroke; Sebastian whimpers at the sight and the subsequent flood of feeling, so acute he can’t tell whether it’s pleasure or pain.  
  
Chris strokes him some more. Sebastian gasps and whines and tries to twist—away, toward, he isn’t sure. The strange beautiful anguish builds and builds with each rub at his shaft, over and over; his cock never fills completely but he feels—he feels—he needs—  
  
Chris rolls a thumb over the head, across his slit; scratches lightly right _there_ with a nail and orders, “Come.”  
  
And he comes, convulsing with it, a sensation unlike any he’s ever known: the orgasm seems drawn from his soul, his spine, his heart. He curls in around Chris’s hand on his cock and chokes on a sob. Chris rubs at the head of his cock again—nothing left, dry and sparking as summer thunderstorms despite the surrounding bath—and this time it hurts, oh it hurts, but he never wants to stop, the hurt’s too much and too good, obliterating thought; and he jerks his hips up and pushes his cock into the loose circle of his Dominant’s hand and then he cries, incoherent, uncomprehending, chasing the feeling and thrusting mindlessly over and over.  
  
Chris shushes him and pets him and takes the hand away eventually, easing him down. Sebastian pants, twitches, but comes back faster this time: the edge of pain adds a certain reality, and he’s not as far under as he’d been before. He clings to Chris nevertheless. Maybe for longer than he needs to. Chris feels strong as bedrock and New England granite, and lets Sebastian clutch his arm awkwardly at the side of the tub.  
  
“Did you like that?” Chris is smiling, tracking his face. “ ’Cause I like that. Doin’ that for you. _To_ you. Love seein’ how much you can take, the way you’re mine, the way you want to be. When you come ’cause I make you, because I want you to. My hands on you.”  
  
“I love that,” Sebastian whispers. “Yours.”  
  
Chris kisses him, for that. And teases his left foot out of the bath and even scrubs his toes. Sebastian laughs, beckons with eyes and a foot-wiggle: aren’t you going to join me, sir?  
  
This earns a grin, and Chris swings himself into the tub too, right up against him. Hot water leaps up exuberantly but does not overflow; it’s considerate water, but also the tub’s purposefully designed for two grown men, if not more. Chris had overseen the bathroom remodel; Sebastian suspects an entire fairytale dragon could fit into this tub, and likely a second in the shower with the elegant pebblework floor.  
  
“Hi,” Chris says, breathless, conspiratorial, giddy.  
  
“I love you,” Sebastian says, and Chris engulfs him in strong arms and a tidal wave of soapy water. This necessitates some flailing and extrication of water from eyes; Sebastian blinks through flattened strands of hair, and Chris kisses his forehead and gently moves the hair.  
  
After some squirming around they get situated anew; Chris has collected Sebastian’s shampoo from their shower, and pours some out, keeping an arm around him. The shampoo turns into a scalp massage, sublimely talented hands sending him into a boneless sprawl of relaxation. Chris’s hands knead suds through his hair; the water surrounds him and buoys him up. He feels heavier, lethargic and golden. The bathroom’s hushed but for the splash and leap of water and the occasional quiet murmur of Chris’s voice and bodies moving. Sebastian’s world glows.

 

 _Chris_  
  
He runs hands through Sebastian’s hair. Kneads soap-suds and shampoo into wet tangles: light and dark at play. Washes away sweat and exertion, leaving cleanness behind. He watches the flow of it through his fingers.  
  
Sebastian yawns, sleepy and pliable, and tilts his head further into Chris’s caress. He’s barely awake, drifting in and out, wholly surrendered to his Dominant’s care. A breath catches in Chris’s throat. Butterfly-wings flutter.  
  
He cups water in hands, pours it over his husband’s head. Sebastian makes a vague unfocused sound of pleasure and tips his head back. Chris, rinsing shampoo before it can dart for beautiful eyes, feels his chest ache. Emotion too big to contain.  
  
He will take such care. He will be so good to this man. He will be worthy of Sebastian. He vows this to Sebastian’s hair.  
  
His submissive’s falling asleep leaning against him, contented and warm; that’s a good sign, he’s not in pain or upset or heading for a crash, but Chris needs to get him out of the tub. Not a place for napping. Not really, anyway.  
  
Out of the bath, he smothers Sebastian in an oversized luxurious towel, bundling him up in warmth. Sebastian wavers on his feet, not yet coordinated; Chris steadies him, pats every inch of pale golden skin until it’s dry, kisses parted lips. Sebastian recognizes the kiss instantly and tries to kiss back, dreamy and soft. Chris cuddles him for a minute for that.  
  
He keeps his submissive securely in the crook of his arm while pulling out clothing. Pajama pants, a loose long-sleeved blue shirt. No underwear. He’s not sure Sebastian can get dressed without assistance; clouds’re presently reflected in those mountain-pool eyes. Sebastian tries to help anyway. Chris gently redirects an arm and tugs the shirt down. “Warm enough?”  
  
This gets a nod. And then a belated curious gaze at the shirt and plaid fuzzy pants. The gaze travels up to Chris’s face. Chris grins. “I want you wearing my clothes, sub. Tonight you take what I give you. Mine.”  
  
Sebastian nods again. Voiceless. Happy. Eyes brighter than the moonglow outside.  
  
“God, I love you,” Chris says, “so fuckin’ much.”  
  
Sebastian nods one more time, emphatic, smiling.  
  
They’re nearly the same size, and Chris’s clothes encircle Sebastian like they’ve just been waiting to be asked. Chris is an inch or so taller, maybe _marginally_ broader across the shoulders; but close enough, and that sight, Sebastian safe in _his_ shirt and pajama pants, Sebastian _being_ his—  
  
That sight turns always-present protective sparks into a hearth-fire, in Chris’s chest.  
  
He picks up the collar. The evening sighs to itself outside, fulfilled.  
  
Sebastian reaches back to lift his own hair—getting long, and drying into cheerful waves—out of the way. Eager.  
  
Chris steps closer to him, still naked and no less in charge for it, and loops black-and-blue leather around his husband’s throat, and then stops, hand lying over the undone buckle.  
  
His hand’s had a flash of memory, unbidden. Their wedding-morning. This new-bought collar in its box, and Sebastian’s terrified voice pleading with him, slipping into frightened Romanian and back to English with desperate effort: _please don’t make me do this, I know we have to, I’m so scared, who do I become once I’m yours?_  
  
His fingers tremble against Sebastian’s skin.  
  
His submissive turns, looking up across the inch between them. Light falls like smooth honey across his hair, his cheekbone, spilled by bedroom lamps. “Chris.”  
  
“Hey,” Chris breathes, breathes because his voice will crack on anything louder, “so’re you feeling up to talking, ’cause I can wait, or hold you more.”  
  
Sebastian says, “I love you.” And Chris’s world unfolds back into equilibrium like a blossoming origami cathedral. Full of reverence, and architecturally sound.  
  
He buckles the collar around Sebastian’s throat. Sebastian smiles anew, and flowers bloom across the cathedral courtyards. Blue like hyacinths, Chris thinks, like those beloved eyes.  
  
“I love you,” he says back.   
  
“Yes, sir,” Sebastian answers, equally hushed. They’re standing barefoot beside the bed. “I know.”  
  
He asked Sebastian once to use his name. He’d thought that would be easier for a sub who’d never done formal training; he’d thought that would be more personal for them. He touches an index finger to his husband’s lips. Sebastian kisses it, breath warm over Chris’s fingerprint, lines and whorls.  
  
Sebastian’d never wanted to be contracted to a Dominant. Had never called anyone _sir_ and meant it, not for more than occasional furtive club nights and underground scenes.  
  
He says, “You’re mine.”   
  
Sebastian’s lips quirk upward into a marvelous smile, behind the fingertip. “I’m yours.”  
  
Pride swells his chest, luminous and bashful. He’s done this for Sebastian. He’s taking care of Sebastian. Sebastian’s given him body and heart to chastise and caress and reward and pleasure, and Chris is doing it right, is doing right by him.  
  
He gathers his husband into his arms. Offers kisses, touches, lazy deliberate rubs of hands along Sebastian’s back, up under the shirt to explore the plane of his back, lower to trace the jut of his hips and remind them both that no underwear’s involved. Sebastian lets out tiny gasps and wordless sounds of encouragement; Chris laughs and kisses him more, tongue plundering that wide happy mouth, savoring every taste of him.  
  
He knows Sebastian’s got a few bruises, scratches, marks; not feeling them yet, maybe, still floating, but he knows. Nothing bad, though. Fading pink handprints across his ass. One or two small bruises from harder pinches. Sorenesses that aren’t _quite_ bruises at his knees: he’d knelt on the hard wood of the floor without moving. At Chris’s command.  
  
He’s not sure Sebastian can handle stairs. He doesn’t want to leave his husband alone, even for a sprint to the kitchen to retrieve a second bottle of water and snacks. He bites his lip, deciding, debating; and throws on sweatpants of his own. He manages to do this while holding Sebastian’s hand.  
  
“Chris?” Sebastian’s voice remains small, almost shy, but unwavering; he’s not afraid to ask a question, only sweetly deferential. Chris is in charge, and Sebastian belongs to him, and that’s right, this belonging. Because Sebastian’s chosen this; because they’ve both chosen this.  
  
“Yeah?” He eases his submissive down onto the bed. Sebastian looks tired. “What do you need, baby?”  
  
“I’m a little thirsty…” Sebastian scrunches that adorable nose at him, still hazy but regaining some clarity, kiss-flushed and tousle-haired. “I don’t want you to leave, but I think…I could use water, and I wanted to say something.”  
  
Chris has asked him for that. Chris asked him for that on the very first night: speak up if you need anything, if you want something, if I’m not doing something you want. And Sebastian’s smiling.  
  
“Okay,” Chris says obediently, lost in that smile.  
  
“Chris?”  
  
“Oh…um…right, yeah, water, I’ll just—you don’t want me to leave. Um.”  
  
“I can manage stairs.”  
  
“Can you?”  
  
“…possibly? Will you hold onto me?”  
  
“Always,” Chris confirms, “always,” and does.  
  
Sebastian can, it turns out, manage stairs with his Dominant’s support; but he’s visibly more tired by the end, long legs shaky and uncertain as a foal’s in a thunderstorm. He clings to Chris for a minute once they reach the sofa; he buries his face in Chris’s chest and shivers and says something. Chris doesn’t quite hear.   
  
“Seb?” He runs a hand over that dark head, lets his palm rest heavy over black leather and a buckle. “Hey, you’re okay, I’ve got you, I’m right here, I’m not goin’ anywhere. I love you. I love you and you’re mine and you’re so good for me, sub, it’s okay, you’re okay, what’d you say? Just now?”  
  
Sebastian swallows. Leans against Chris’s strength. “Safe. What I said. How I feel.”  
  
“Oh,” Chris says, humbled. “Oh.”  
  
He gets Sebastian settled on the sofa, surrounded by helpful pillows; he brings back water and the other half of Sebastian’s expensive velvety dark chocolate brick from the refrigerator, plus apple slices and peanut butter. His sub needs some sort of restorative food after exertion, and Chris can’t cook but can at least handle slicing an apple or two.  
  
He feeds Sebastian an apple slice, and then another, idly.  
  
Around them night steals in like indolent rivers: midnight-blue speckled with New York confetti-light outside, creamy walls and big cushions and topaz lamplight in the apartment. Knitted blankets around Sebastian’s shoulders and science-fiction paperbacks comfortably approving from their shelves. The crisp autumnal juice of apples bursting across tastebuds when he steals one of the slices.  
  
His sketchbook’s lying on the coffee table. He glances at it; grimaces inwardly. He doesn’t want to move.   
  
He holds the water for Sebastian to take a sip. The sketches, unfinished, lurk meaningfully at the edge of his vision. He’d had a goal for the day, work to do; they both had. He’d come flying home to find his husband, and he doesn’t regret that.  
  
But.  
  
Old familiar anxiety pokes a single warning needle into his gut. He didn’t finish. He set a goal and he didn’t finish.  
  
He looks down at Sebastian. Who’s curled up beside him, head pillowed on Chris’s thigh, wearing Chris’s clothes, eating and drinking what Chris gives him, nibbling tidbits out of Chris’s hand.  
  
Sebastian’s back under, he’s pretty sure, a lighter form of subspace; not deep, but kept there drifting on currents just below the surface. Kept under by handfeeding and caresses and the twinges of small marks, by the weight of his collar and the acceptance of the evening’s ordeal.  
  
He pets Sebastian’s hair, traces the arch of an eyebrow. He does not rest his hand over Sebastian’s eyes, though he thinks of it; he wants Sebastian to lie still and be soothed and belong with inarguable certainty to him, held in secure comforting dark and Chris’s touch. Sebastian hates blindfolds, though.  
  
Chris will never hurt him. Never intentionally; he’s done so by accident already, but they’ve both done that. He’s punished Sebastian, but they’ve both agreed to that. He’ll never purposefully do anything Sebastian’s asked that they avoid. Never, never.  
  
He traces the line of Sebastian’s lips, instead. Sebastian parts them unquestioningly and suckles at Chris’s fingers, two of them, as they slip inside. Chris lets him play and mouth and lap at them, docile and devout and tactile, enjoying his mouth being kept full.  
  
He shuts his own eyes for a second, letting peace sink into his bones.  
  
“Hey,” he says after a while, other hand rubbing his submissive’s back. “You okay? Still thirsty, hungry, anything?” If Sebastian just needs to float and be held, that’s fine too. “Up to talking?”  
  
Sebastian blinks, nods, turns his head and stops indulging himself with Chris’s fingers. “ _Da_.”  
  
“Love you.”  
  
“I love you. I feel…I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe…”  
  
“Subspace,” Chris says, and pets his hip. “I know. I can see you. Will you, um, would you be okay if I…needed to…get some work done?”  
  
“Work?”  
  
“Right here,” he clarifies hastily. “You don’t even have to move. I won’t move. I just, um…” He doesn’t want Sebastian to blame himself for interrupting said work, earlier. Not when they’ve moved ahead together. “I just wanted to finish a couple of sketches. Or I can not, if you need my attention.”  
  
“I like you petting me,” Sebastian says drowsily, “but I’ll be all right if you just touch me every once in a while. I should…come back?…in any case; this doesn’t feel like…I can’t stay like this forever.”  
  
“For now you can,” Chris says. “I want you to. I mean, yeah, you’re not wrong, it wouldn’t be good for you if we never get you to come back and level out, but right now you’re fine. For a while longer. Stay under. Trust me.”  
  
“I do.” Sebastian yawns. “Was I asleep? But…no…was I?”  
  
“Nope. Does anything hurt?” He squeezes his husband’s ass—lightly—to demonstrate. “Feel that?”  
  
“Good,” Sebastian murmurs, eyes sliding shut, opening, blissful. “It just—feels good. Everywhere. Anywhere you touch me, all over…”  
  
“Perfect,” Chris says, “you’ll tell me if it starts hurting, or you feel sore, or you feel thirsty again, anything, clear?”  
  
“Yes, Chris.”  
  
“Good little sub,” Chris tests, “good boy, so good, listening to me,” and he’s not a hundred percent confident about the more traditional endearments but Sebastian sighs and shivers and goes even more boneless against him, lips parting, evidently pleased. He’s Chris’s good boy, then, Chris decides on the spot; and forever will be.  
  
He steadies Sebastian with a hand and lunges for his sketchbook and a pencil. Sebastian reaches for him after, gesture transparent in desire, unabashed. “Okay,” Chris says again, and gets them both back in position on the couch. “So…I’m just gonna finish these real quick…stay here, rest, be good, and maybe I’ll feel like rewarding you, after.”  
  
“Yes, Chris.” His submissive yawns once more, worn out and lovely, collared and unashamed because that’s what Chris has asked of him. “Sketches?”  
  
“Designs for the mural for the Lucas Lee Memorial Wall. What I was workin’ on this aftern—what I’ve been working on. You know who Lucas Lee was?” He’s occupying one hand with newly-showered dark hair, coiling fluffy silk around fingers. It really is getting long; Sebastian’s going to need to either cut it or start buying hair ties.   
  
Chris could, as his Dominant, order him to keep it long or to shorten it. But he won’t; that’s up to the person whose hair it actually is, unless Sebastian tells him to decide. And he likes Sebastian’s hair either way. He just likes Sebastian.  
  
Who makes a languid but inquisitive sound in response to the question. “Should I?”  
  
“Nah, no reason you would. Terrible action movie star, skateboarding legend, kind of a dick, died young and tragically when some kid dared him to do a trick on an iced-over handrail. But I’m getting paid a lot, and he left most of his money to support skate camps and acting camps for kids, so.”  
  
“So not a one hundred percent dick.”  
  
“Bet you never thought you’d say that phrase in any language.”  
  
“Oh…I don’t know…” Sebastian’s eyes sparkle through rainbow-tinted clouds. “I quite enjoy one hundred percent of your dick, Chris.”  
  
“Be kinda worried if you didn’t.” Speaking of, he’s inspired. He sneaks his hand around into the front of pajama pants. Sebastian’s half-hard, no surprise given the petting and subspace and arousal, but also sore and sensitive after so many orgasms; the lightest grip of Chris’s hand around him earns a twitch and a whimper of, “Sir—Chris, please…”  
  
“More, or stop?”  
  
“I don’t know.” Sebastian’s shivering. “It’s so much…”  
  
“Shh. It’s okay, I won’t, I want you to rest.” He moves the hand; he needs it to help balance the sketchbook for a second anyway. “Might play with you a little, if you don’t mind. Keep you here, just like this, because I want to. Because you’re mine, and _this_ is mine.” He cups Sebastian’s stiffening cock through pajama pants, this time: a shielding layer of fabric between hand and aching flesh. Sebastian moans at the words and pushes hips into Chris’s hand. His eyes go darker, drawn down into deep slow waters where thought dissolves.  
  
“I love this, you know,” Chris tells him, “this, you, touching you, the way you sound when I play with you, the way you look right now, the way you give me, God, everything. I love you. Now stay put and rest, and I’m gonna finish this, and then we’ll see about dinner, maybe I’ll just keep you on your knees and feed you down there, or maybe have you on my lap while I feed you, so I can keep a hand right here.” He rubs at Sebastian’s hot hard cock again through the pajamas, liking the small cry that results—not a no or a stop—and liking the way a single drop of wet appears to stain fabric over the swollen tip. He explores further back, venturing underneath again, teasing the curves of Sebastian’s backside, seeking out his freshly-washed and recently-spanked hole. “Want that, sub?”  
  
“Yes,” Sebastian sighs, “yes, oh yes, Chris,” and kisses Chris’s thigh, body lax and supple and willing to be toyed with as his Dominant desires.  
  
“Seb,” Chris says, quiet.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“What you said…you offered…about wearing something. A fitness monitor, heartrate, somethin’, so I know you’re. What you said. Safe.”  
  
Sebastian blinks, coming back enough to process, clearly hearing the importance.  
  
“I feel like I shouldn’t have to ask you for that,” Chris admits, but he’s willing to admit anything to Sebastian, his anchor, his other soul, so: “I kinda want to, though. If you really wouldn’t mind. At least maybe—maybe for a few days, ’cause today, I…” I was scared. I thought I might’ve lost you. I know it’s just my messed-up head and an old scar shaped like a funeral. I can calm down, I’m trying, here with my hand on your hip and your head in my lap. Please never leave me.  
  
“I know,” Sebastian says. “I know. I was scared as well, Chris, I—but yes. I said I’d try; it was my idea, you recall. So yes. For a few days, or longer, whatever you need. To know I’m safe. I _am_ safe, with you.”  
  
Chris stares down at him, swallows around the brand-new lump clogging his throat, chokes out, “I love you…”  
  
“I’m not scared now,” Sebastian tells him, and shifts position, curls up even closer to him, unearths a hand from blankets and outlines a lopsided heart on Chris’s thigh. “And I love you.”


End file.
